It's hard when you are so happy and your brain is trying to empower you to write about such sad events. This is not to say that my entire life has been sad. All in all, I've had a wonderful life thus far. Yes. There have been many rocks, twists and turns along the road, but it's these memories that have made me into a stronger person. It's these memories that make me so appreciative of what I have now.
But sometimes I let myself falter. Sometimes I cave and become that small, insecure being that somehow always felt invisible.
Sometimes it seems easier to be her when in all reality, I could never ever go back.
It's been two months since I have written anything real and it's the fear of what will come out that's holding me back. I've never disciplined myself to sit and think only about me and my life experiences. I always find myself going back and forth between one person to another, wanting to know more about them, too scared to open the closed door within myself to learn more of who I am; too scared to reveal the true person that lies within.
What if no one likes her?
What if I don't like her?
I've become so frustrated while reading old poetry by a girl who could only see the suffering in the world. Wars, famine and tears made her angry and powerless; keeping all of that pent up anxiety mostly inside until she burst out with random words on paper. Poetry of one failed relationship after the other.
The names always changed, but the poems remained the same.
None of this is interesting. It's simply annoying.
God. I was so annoying!
I mean, I am all about peace and love and am completely anti-war, but writing 300 some poems about this mere fact got me absolutely nowhere. It only lead to more bad poetry and less of me being able to understand that I couldn't save the whole entire world. It was exhausting and even now, it's exhausting to go back and read it all; to feel that old familiar pain that is always lingering somewhere within me.
In other words, rediscovering one's self is an absolute bitch.
It's no wonder that I often find myself half passed out on the couch in the evenings, asking myself over and over again, what did I do to make me so tired? The truth of it is that I spend a lot of my energy on a daily basis worrying about every little thing from if I forgot to say "Thank You" in the checkout line to "How in the world did Amendment One get passed?" Sometimes, in fact most times, I can't shut my brain off long enough to even get a decent night's sleep.
And yet I'm not unhappy. I'm the happiest I've ever been. I don't feel like I have ever been a negative person and yet so much of my writing has come out in negative thoughts. Perhaps "negative" isn't the correct word. Maybe "real" is more fitting. Everything I write about is about "real world issues". But it's hard being such a positive, happy, daisy picking person, constantly thinking about everything that's wrong in the world.
Why think about it then?
Because you have to if you want to be a part of fixing it.
I have always tried to see the silver lining in every situation I've encountered. I admit, there was a brief time when I wanted to give up and let myself drown in the current I was fighting so hard against. I wanted so badly to go back to the days of watching the newest Disney movie with my Dad, riding bikes out in the front yard with my brother and taking walks and picking flowers in the garden with my Mom.
I didn't realize that I never really had to stop doing these things. Society secretly took over without me even realizing and I got so caught up in what's right and wrong, appropriate and inappropriate. I got lost in the shuffle of everything.
It was no one's fault but my own.
At one point, I think I truly lost my favorite part of myself; the naivety of believing that everyone is truly good on the inside, it just sometimes comes out bad on the outside. I let this one personality trait take over completely and it nearly erased me into someone I no longer recognized. I became jaded and always hurt and suspicious, never trusting and always thinking everyone had a secret agenda. I went from one extreme to the other. There was no happy medium. I was "Little Girl Lost".
But I broke free, and though sometimes I still have days full of nothing but worry and regret, I look around me and am reminded how very far I have come. I refuse to be taken back in by the evils that threaten my happiness. It may catch me off guard from time to time, but I will always be just a little bit stronger.
I will always win in the end.
"I was born to laugh. I learned to laugh through my tears. I was born to love. I'm gonna learn to love, without fear."
Over the Rhine
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